hard to summarize, but here’s my attempt, a lot of this is paraphrased directly from the video:

Conspiracy thinking is nothing new (e.g. in 64CE after the great fire of Rome Romans thought the fire was a conspiracy by Emperor Nero), and constitutes a way of thinking. It is popular because it is fun, gives you as sense of special identity, and gives you a sense of control and power in a chaotic and often disempowering world. Being able to feel like you are personally connecting the dots is psychologically compelling, like a good detective story.

Contra names this way of thinking “Conspiracism”, and it includes:

• intentionalism: nothing happens by accident, big events imply intentional conspiracy, e.g. major climate disasters are manufactured by a secret cabal of scientists and the elites
• dualism: everything is a fight between good and evil, which are inherent, e.g. the elite are all Satanists who epitomize evil and are motivated by their pure evil
• symbolism: everything has meaning, nothing is a coincidence, e.g. the monster energy drink looks a little like the Hebrew character for the numeral 6 repeated three times, so it must mean monster energy drinks are connected to the secret cabal of satanists conspiring against us

Part 4: The Ritual

Conspiracists seem to be obsessed with rituals. Rituals usually coordinate social relations and establish status, e.g. weddings, coronations, readings of judicial verdicts, which authorize relationships of power. The assumption is that secret conspirators also have secret rituals.

A lot of the imagination about the secret evil rituals of conspirators start to seem a lot like “pornography for Puritans” - essentially false and imaginative reports are conjured up about all the evil rituals happening behind closed doors, like the Satanic Panic of the 90s, and conspiracists are able to justify their perverse obsession and interest in sexually lurid and taboo accounts by claiming to be righteously invested in saving children from those ritual abuses and so on. This also relates to the way witch hunts involved disrobing women and carefully inspecting their bodies in public for witch marks, the stated motivations are to identify witches, but it implies a repressed sexual desire that is fulfilled with righteous justifications.

From here Contra argues that we shouldn’t take seriously the claims that conspiracists are genuinely invested in children or justice, and that many of them are basically just perverts hiding their obsessive sexual fantasies and forbidden desires behind righteous and moral justifications. (She shares the clip from It’s Always Sunny where Mac says “No way, someone uploaded naked pics online, that’s disgusting! Where did he post those?” as an example of this.)

A lot of times conspiracism also takes the form of revenge porn, like To Catch a Predator which never involves child victims and focuses not at all on victims and real justice, but instead running sting operations that allow televising the entrapment and punishment of would-be predators. It’s not really about justice, it is a kind of sadism, a desire to engage in (justified) violence.

Part 5: It’s a big club and you ain’t in it

Contra points out that Conspiracists love the George Carlin quote, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it”. Common to conspiracism is that the belief that the conspirators are a powerful elite and you and everyone else you know are at the bottom of the social hierarchy (e.g. “debt slaves”).

But George Carlin isn’t a conspiracist, he’s populist socialist. Populism is defined by Contra as the belief that there is a “we” (the people) and a “they” (the establishment elite).

Who is put in each category differs by ideology - Marxists would say the working classes are the “we”, and those who exploit laborers (capitalists) are the “they”. Nationalists generate a “we” based on notions of race, ethnicity, and/or citizenship who are opposed to a foreign, invasive, or degenerate “they”.

Populism is appealing to conspiracists, who create a “we” based on those who are not in on the conspiracy, and a “they” that are the conspirators.

The “they” that conspiracists believe in usually turn out to be Jewish - conspiracism is usually anti-Semitic. This isn’t that surprising, given Hitler himself was a conspiracist, and his writings include conspiracy theories about how the Jews control the Free Masons and other typical conspiracist fodder.

Jews function as a scapegoat, a group the conspiracists can point to and blame everything on. This goes back even to medieval Europe, when Jews were barred from participating in most trades, but the one trade they were permitted to engage in was usury (the lending of money), so the medieval elite would hire “a court Jew” to manage their finances. This is how the Rothschilds family became so successful and thus wealthy, but their wealth and influence isn’t that significant as conspiracists believe, and especially do not size up compared to the wealth of tech oligarchs like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Contra then introduces the idea that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, that lots of people know something is wrong and exploitative about society and the economic situation, but they lack the education and context to correctly analyze the power dynamics. Socialism is thus always at risk of turning reactionary, and Stalin is given as an example of someone who led his own anti-Semitic purges once in power.

Jews aren’t the only scapegoats of conspiracists, similar thinking is applied to LGBTQ+ folks, e.g. their “disproportionate influence” in the arts and entertainment, which Contra points out is a grain of truth that is largely due to discrimination in other industries (rather than due to some conspiracy).

So generally this conspiracist form of populist succeeds because people don’t like outsiders, and bigotry is more successful at forming and bonding political alliances, and is more coherent even once that alliance takes power.

Richard Nixon for example was a conspiracist who even after becoming the president of the United States was paranoid and obsessed with the liberal establishment. Being in power and thus becoming “the establishment” didn’t undermine his conspiracist thinking, nor support from conspiracists. Ironically, Nixon is also known for one of the biggest conspiracies in U.S. history, and Contra points out that conspiracists are probably more likely to engage in conspiring because they believe their “counter-conspiracy” is justified by the conspiracies they think are already being perpetuated against them.

Trump likewise engaged in conspiracies to interfere with and overthrow the 2020 election, under the guise of the (falsified) “stop the steal” conspiracy theory that Biden stole the election.

Conspiracists never take responsibility, whenever something looks bad about their movement, they will claim that it’s not true or was staged - for example January 6th insurrectionists claiming it was a false flag operation planned by the opposition.

Contra despairs about viral tiktok videos of Hitler’s speeches being translated into English by AI, and all the people who find Hitler’s speeches compelling, e.g. because he burned research on trans people upon taking power and supports conspiracist beliefs about the Jews controlling banks and the economy, etc.

Contra loses it and just calls it what it is: stupidity. Listening to Hitler’s speeches and agreeing with them, and then thinking the mainstream media was just lying to you about what Hitler was about, rather than thinking there might be something wrong with the way you are thinking when you are in such strong agreement with Hitler, is just astoundingly dumb. It shows so much ignorance and a susceptibility to propaganda that it is difficult to believe.

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This “summary” got too long, so I had to break this into two comments, see part two below.

I have an interest in philosophy separately, so contra was one of my favorite channels for years, even before she transitioned. Ironically her transition and her trans content did not help me understand myself or contribute to my egg-cracking at all 😆